[edit] 126 THE ATHENAEUM No. 4582, Aug. 21, 1915

Sailor and Beachcomber. By A. Safroni-Middleton. (Grant Richards, lOs. 6d. net.)

THE literature of the South Seas is becoming almost as voluminous as that of the War. Here is another desultory tale of wandering years mainly spent in the delectable land of sunshine that the prosaic atlas calls Polynesia. The author is a traveller and sailor who is best known as the composer of those cheerful military marches which are a permanent feature of many a brass-band programme. The uninitiated have probably imagined that he is the master of a military band. They is are very wide of the mark indeed. He spent in a wilder and more undisciplined youth than is likely to fall to the lot of any young Englishman of to-day. He was one of those boys for whom the rigid routine of the English school is absolutely impossible. The pages of romance, he tells us, filled his thoughts far more than school-books and accordingly at the mature age of 14 he decided to cast himself adrift and see the world. When he was once on board a clipper bound for Australia his life fairly begun.

      The voyage out to Brisbane was un-eventful, except for an episode with the captain's daughter, which shows the boy of 14 was precocious beyond his years. But after five months of ship- board the young sailor was hungry for more stirring things. As soon as the ship was alongside he got his sea-chest ashore and bolted. He quickly met his fate. A magnificent scheme for setting himself up as a tea merchant was the cause the trouble. The embryo merchant thought that he had got to windward of a house agent by acquiring, with a capital of pound or two, a tea shop on a desiral site in the middle of a proposed township. When the shop was found to be in the middle of a deserted piece of waste ground its new owner was not so sanguine; and when at the end of a month he hadsold one pound of tea and the rent was due, he began to realize that the agen thad swindled him. The tea business was abandoned, and the boy fled to Brisbane. Here he was soon tasting the fruits of real vagabondage -sleeping on wharves an in odd corners of steamers, working in tanyard, tramping the bush. He had one asset - he could play the violin. This brought him money, and later led to an engagement in the Brisbane Theatl Orchestra. But neighther work nor money stayed for very long with him, and after various other vicissitudes he found himself at sea again in a schooner bound for that earthly paradise, Samoa.

      In Samoa adventure and romance came treading on each other's heels. Thanks partly to his violin-playing and partly to his own personality, the boy made friends wherever he went, and though times might now and again be hard, on the whole he enjoyed life to the full, and went through an amazing variety of experiences. He fell violently in love with a native girl; he played at native weddings, and once at what he believed to be a cannibal feast; he met Stevenson; he mixed with traders and saiors and savages and beachcombers of every type.
 
      All is not gold that glitters in fair Samoa, and along with a perfect climate, a tropical luxuriance, there are aspects of life as infinitely sad and hopeless as may be found in any London slum. Of the kind of life depicted in the opening chapters of 'The Ebb Tide,' the author saw as much as it is good for a boy of 15 to see, and it is a tribute to him that he kept his head level and above water. His wanderings took him to Apia, Tahiti, the Marquesas and Fiji groups, and many of the other islands that lie scattered over the Pacific in such profusion. Englishmen were discovered in the most unlikely places. In Fiji a Cockney from Mile End was found, with a native wife and famHy, living in perfect contentment in the mountains. The man was possibly a fugitive from justice, and there were others to whom the South Seas offered - and no doubt still offers - a safe and happy refuge.
 
      After a long spell of the islands the wanderer found his way back to Sydney, where he went in for the flower-seed business, tramped the bush again, was a waiter in a restaurant, went gold-digging shipped before the mast to San Francisco and back, and undertook various other enterprises, most of them unprofitable. As long as he had any money left ihis pocket he was happy. The last chapter ends with the boy, now approaching manhood, preparing to set out in a sailing ship for South America.

      On the whole, ‘Sailor and BeachComber’ Is one of the most satisfactory books of wandering travel that we have come across. The style racy and unaffected, and free from boasting and egotisism A publisher's note calls attention to the meetings and conversations which the author had with Stevenson. These have ,been freely quoted, but throw little fresh light on Stevenson's character. His charm and boyish gaiety, his kindness to the natives, and the love and veneration they felt for him, have often been dwelt upon. The letters to Sir Sidney Colvin still stand as the most intimate pictures of the real Stevenson. In his estimate of the morals and characteristics of the South Sea natives, the author is not, perhaps, very complimentary to the influence of the white man, nor does he believe greatly in the efforts of the missionaries, though e he admits that there are honest men among them. He dislikes the boasting of the Germans, who then kept most of the stores in Apia; but that, of course, is nothing new. The German abroad has as great a faculty for making enemies as Mr. Safroni~Middleton appears to have for making friends.